


bell-clear

by cordialcount



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (With Skating), Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 05:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11593557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: Michele, she will realize, tried to warn her: "If you keep watching her, she'll make you stay."At the time this falls somewhere on Mila's attention/grossness list betweenCan I get Yuri to drink the milk if I don't say it's expiredand the knowledge that Sara never washes her soakers.





	bell-clear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



Michele, she will realize, tried to warn her: "If you keep watching her, she'll make you stay."

At the time this falls somewhere on Mila's attention/grossness list between _Can I get Yuri to drink the milk if I don't say it's expired_ and the knowledge that Sara never washes her soakers. Michele has shown no faith in his sister outside a 60x30 rectangle; Mila isn't showing him any, either. "That is what it means to be good, isn't it?" She pats his back. The floodlights in the rink do his charisma no favors, and some of his foundation has smeared onto his shirt. Remembering the sparse attendance at his last competition—the bleachers as cleanly lined up as a Connect Four between Sara, parenthetic against her, and Michele, stumbling through his free—she adds, "Shouldn't she rivet everyone to their seats?"

His jaw works. "You take care, I cannot," he says, and stomps toward a locker room.

Mila thinks this is a charmingly poor use of idiom. With both a Worlds and girlfriend title to look down from, she can afford him some pity. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Sara has traded over-telegraphed lutz setups for a pattern of double rockers. Mila watches the minute ripples of Sara's collarbones and wrists as the ice begins to sing for her, chirpy, invitational. Mila, stuck with the low monotony of a clocktower at best, would like to eat up this sound, and the tension between the metronome presses of those knees besides; but Victor is the only skater to have worked out how to render the sound tangible, like dust in one's eye. _Mother's luck_ , Yakov had said when young Mila complained. _If you want Yubileyny to sing for you, be born at its doorstep, or be born so far it offers you the hospitality due a stranger._

She shrugs off her jacket and pits her figures against Sara's. Works larger radii, feeling her hamstrings ache with vicious speed, until Sara swings onto Mila's circle and catches her with her last turn unchecked. "No balance for you," Sara says, Mila's hair curled by the exhale. Her dimples become prime prey for Sara's lips. 

At a closeup this extreme Sara's makeup discloses a spider vein under her eye. Mila is just locating it with her cheekbone when she feels her hip uncoil. 

It's almost beneath notice. "You're still on pattern!"

"Yes, do you know how much it costs to get freestyle to myself?" Sara says.

A deep edge into the turn and a peal rings off the ice. Sara's control of two people's bodies with zero perceptible torque from her shoulders is awful, Mila thinks: awfully sure. Mila focuses instead on a single dark eyelash, resting, neatly, over her lip. "This is a little violin," Mila says, flicking the miniature mustache off on her way to an aggressive waist-hold lift. "Now fight me off again, if I'm such an intruder—" and Sara laughs.

At their first meeting, Tivoli Park JGP, that laugh had startled Mila over the popping and sizzling of the snack bar. Sara's whole frame had been shaking with it when Mila turned. She had been struck like a tuning fork, her heart run to interference when Sara stepped on the ice and the ice gave her chords: not in love, but in pursuit. What's one more thing on the ice that can break Mila? Won't Sara's affection be more consistent than her triple axel?

Even taking Sara's laugh now against her lips—re-centered and poised, her head carried tautly against the next rotation of their feet—Mila is still holding the hook. The salt is spilt. She's listening, and watching: waiting to sense she can have nothing more permanent than this performance, or this song, or this hunger.

 

 

 

Their AC gives out. They're in Yubileyny by three in the morning.

Mila has cultivated a friendship (not a briberyship, because none of _her_ money is involved) that allows them in, but today the Zamboni has yet to be run. Divots cluster everywhere but the faceoff circle, which bears only marginally less resemblance to a minefield, and besides the unpocked snatches of ice are so soft she is surprised her edges prevail above the sand. When Sara draws no song, Mila says, "Let's get oladyi," although she doesn't enjoy the aftertaste of starch, and reaches for her skate guards under the boards. Anywhere they form more than silhouettes; anywhere the silence around Sara will not cowl her.

"I have something to ask you," Sara says.

The light through the nearest window is very delicate. Under it Sara could trounce any schoolbook model, her hair hung soft and greyscale as she precisely counterweights through a continuous serpentine. 

It occurs to Mila, whose head turns on its own against the foot suspended in the doorway, that Sara has been replicating this figure for some time. Mila's memory goes like a shade. What she can see is how Sara's veins form a figure eight, bruise-shallow, fragile as a note, on her foundation-free cheek. It's the last figure Mila eked out before she brought up the oladyi.

Mila's hands land on her own face. She discovers her eyes are wet. "I didn't know I could," she says. Distantly, she thinks, _I didn't want to hope._ "You've heard the ice when I skate, the sound I get. More... the sound I don't get, Sara, I've always competed on athleticism, I've never expected to enthrall the audience—I didn't think I could affect another skater at all."

"Maybe you couldn't, if I didn't want to hear you," Sara says, almost kindly, "but I did want you. I do, really, don't look at me like that! Do you want to hear what I hear, Mila?"

Mila would put her foot down and skate up and wrap Sara in her jacket, but is held, like her body's just riding an edge, an object for external forces. There's not even a scraping noise as Sara stops instead, right where Mila could share her breath, and traces a fingertip from Mila's browbone to her throat, carving through her powder and sweat and tear-trail in three circles, punctuating each turn with a blunt press of her nail.

All the sound the ice hasn't released in the dark rises through Mila now. It's too close to touch, the full fidelity of music only heard inside her head. A long lifting line of melody, wheeling through the octaves like a turning season; it's bell-clear, Pavlovian, a vibration under her skin: Mila couldn't resist Sara if she tried.

"Yikes," Mila says, "we could have done this much earlier—" before the words are kissed from her mouth.

"Stay," Sara says.

Mila lets the music move her across the ice; she lets herself slip around Sara's waist, in hold, for binding loops around the rink to a shared rhythm, a shared song. A single choir.


End file.
